


Sometimes the best that we can do is start over

by Goonlalagoon



Category: Leagues and Legends - E. Jade Lomax, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers AU, Only major character death mentioned is also dead in canon so not marking with a warning, This started as rambling on Tumblr then I wrote some full paragraphs, as don't think that counts?, let me know if you think differently and I can change
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-07
Updated: 2020-02-08
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:35:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,546
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22604059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Goonlalagoon/pseuds/Goonlalagoon
Summary: Jack crashes a plane into the ocean, Bea scolding him to be home in time for dinner on the line the whole way down, hoping to finally end a war, and wakes up in a different decade just in time to fight against an alien invasion.(Leagues and Legends!Avengers AU)
Kudos: 1





	1. Chapter 1

Jack crashes a plane into the ocean, Bea scolding him to be home in time for dinner on the line the whole way down, hoping to finally end a war, and wakes up in a different decade just in time to fight against an alien invasion.

He’s dragged into the League of Avengers, because they’re smart enough to tell him that S.H.I.E.L.D was founded by Beatrice Tanner (Jones, she’s supposed to be Beatrice _Jones,_ but it wasn’t really a wedding and there wasn’t any paperwork, just the Rangers sitting around a campfire laughing and Sarge grinning as he pretended he was qualified to officiate, and it’s a story that’s been lost in the history books. They barely mention Liam, and then only by codename, hypothesizing about which man in the grainy photographs he was and never getting it right)

(There’s an Agent Jones on his new team, too, who looks at him with cool assessment and radiates competence. He thinks she’s Bidi, for a moment, before remembering that those time lines don’t work, that Bidi is an adult now, older than him except for the years he spent frozen and unknowing. He missed her whole childhood. The Widow introduces herself as Laney Jones, and he _knows_ that name, he saw photos of a younger sibling folded up in Liam’s compass every day so he thinks he knows who she is even if shouldn’t be possible. She doesn’t know, and he can’t tell her, he _can’t,_ and he knows this is going to come back to bite him but he _can’t_. Liam is so far away, his death a distant casualty of a war decades won, but for Jack it’s been barely a year.)

They get through the weird fire creatures from outer space and he starts to settle, restless and desperate. There are deaths on his heels that are history footnotes to the rest of the world and barely processed griefs to him. The team helps, but he also looks at all of them and thinks about gunshots echoing in a mountain pass (a widow, weeping), the scream of a train and his own screaming drowned out as George fell through the snow and vanished for good. He stays at SHIELD because this is what he knows how to do, because Bea always steered them right and he has to trust that her legacy will do the same. He holds her hand in the care home, and they talk about old loves and losses, about the years he missed and the ones they shared. He holds her hand when she remembers him, and when she doesn’t he slopes out, after the first time he tries to remind her and just hurts her more.

Heads breaks into his apartment one day, posture careful and bruises already blooming from a fight he hadn’t seen coming, for all that they’ve been at odds since Jack woke up swinging in a warehouse room trusting that Captain America (codename for the less public records: the Giantkiller) will do the right thing. Jack turns on the light and the director goes down, gunshots through his chest and secrets unspoken. Jack leaves him in the tender care of the other SHIELD agents in the building and goes in pursuit. He flings the shield and freezes when someone catches it, metal hand gleaming gold in the dim street lighting.

It’s all downhill from there, in terms of job security and the ability to trust 95% of the people he works with every day.

They run, Laney and Jack fighting their way free, and something is nagging at him about all of this. She whispers stories about the Slayer to him, the shadow in the night that even assassins are afraid of, even her. She shoots the Slayer’s mask off even so, and Jack hits the tarmac on his knees, the way he had in a mountain pass and on a train after the fighting was done, bruises that will fade by morning even while he’s still reeling from this blow.

 _“George,”_ he whispers, doubtful and hoping, not sure what to say next, and she looks back blankly through a cloud of golden curls before she’s gone without a word.


	2. Chapter 2

The Slayer has no name, no memories, no self. She is nothing but a weapon in the dark; not thoughtless, because to be thoughtless is to be unable to plan, to strategise, to adapt, and the Slayer is able to do all of that as easily as breathing, but focused only on those things that her handlers deem relevant. There is nothing except her Mission; no thought or information except that which is relevant intelligence in order to complete it.

Except.

Except.

 _Except_ , in the back of her head there are lists and lists of careful, impersonal observations. Her handlers do not know, or they have forgotten - all information is precious, is relevant, even if you do not know why at this moment in time. The Slayer is used to not knowing why she must know the things she is told until the moment they provide the key to what must be done. So she notes down her numbered observations, and it is all relevant intelligence, or will be relevant at some unknown point, and so it is not against protocol. When they wipe her, it mostly stays. The gaps seem random, without context, but she picks at them on long waits, trying to piece the pattern together.

She meets her latest target, The Captain, on a busy road in the middle of the day, with no shadows to lurk in. She was briefed thoroughly, given reports to read and shown video of recent battles to analyse. She trained against faceless goons with imitation shields. She made careful note of every strength and weakness, and watched the gaps warily. The Slayer was an assassin, a strategist and an easily underestimated face (they always thought she would be taller). The Captain was a super-soldier, heads taller and twitching at sounds he shouldn’t have been able to hear, shrugging off injuries that should have taken him out of several fights. She _could_ take him out - but with confidence only in the quiet and dark, careful tricks and traps, a knife in the ribs while he slept, and they sent her after him in daylight, when he was ready and waiting, wary.

They showed her nothing of his history before the first instance of the League. No records of training, no reports of his work as Captain during a formative bloody war, no dossiers of his past for her to sift through and find the psychological cracks that would break even the strongest man.

(Later, she will stand in a museum and look at pictures with a familiar face and an unfamiliar name, watch her reflection and try to piece her past together. Later, she will know why they were afraid to show her all of this. She will leave with part of a name, the part that was seldom used and so feels easier to carry, and a list of questions waiting in the back of her mind.)

When they meet, The Captain is just a target, just another body to kill. He flinches when he sees her, face pale and desperate, voice cracking on an unfamiliar name, and it’s almost done there and then because the Slayer knows how to make use of a fault-line to shatter someone open. But he has backup (the Widow is afraid, so _afraid,_ but she’s been choosing for years what she wants to live and die for and she's not about to stop now) so he’s dragged to his feet and put in a position where it isn’t only him who’ll bleed if he goes down (the Widow knows - Farris will take anything as his due, old guilts and old debts, but he doesn’t let others do the same. She knows if her life is on the line he’ll be reaching for her, and he does not know yet just how precious that trust is). The soldier the assassin and the agent chase each other between rubble and broken cars, and only some of them know they’ve met before in different times and places.

She doesn’t win but she survives, and the Slayer adds observations to her notes on Jack Farris as they regroup. She says nothing to her handler, but Thorne has her wiped anyway, paranoid and delighting in the control.

(A lab tech spirits notes on the technology out to her civilian self in secret writing, painstakingly reverse engineering how this has been done the way she has done for so many Hydra experiments over the past years. It’s a heavy weight, this double life, but she keeps on walking. She can’t save them all but she can do nothing but try, and her choices will live bitter under her tongue for all the years of her life, but this is a price she chose a long time ago to pay.) 

The Slayer wakes, taste of blood in her mouth and mind gone smooth and static around the edges. There is a list in the back of her head, but it skips numbers. She eyes the gaps, and wonders.

_(21. I know him)_


End file.
